Nuisance claim against St. Cloud diocese will proceed

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Trouble for the Diocese of St. Cloud. “A Stearns County judge has ruled that a public nuisance claim against the Diocese of St. Cloud by an alleged victim of priest sex abuse may proceed, a move that could pry open the Catholic diocese’s clergy abuse files on the priest sued and all others,” reports Jean Hopfensperger in the Star Tribune. “The St. Cloud diocese lawsuit was filed by a man who says he was sexually abused in the early 1970s by Rev. James Thoennes in the city of Foley. It says the diocese was aware that Thoennes had abused at least one other child previously.”

Why we can’t have nice things.KMSP’s Ted Haller reports, “Terror concerns shut down a historic Air Force Reserve institution at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after May 8 ‘until further notice,’ but now they’ve confirmed it’ll be shut down permanently. … ‘Three factors led to this decision,’ Paul Zadach, a 934th Airlift Wing spokesperson, said. ‘The cost of maintaining the building, declining club membership and costs of operating two clubs (the Officer’s Club and Services Club) and the biggest concern, security of the patrons using the Club.’ ”

For a small town, Lake Elmo seems to have an outsize level of political dysfunction.City Pages’ Cory Zurowski attempts to get to the bottom of why: “Now, everything has gone to hell. And in the middle of the little city with growing pains is Lake Elmo City Council member Anne Smith, who seems to leave behind a scorched earth in all that she touches. … Over the past year, Smith appears to be the one constant in the incessant piss fight that has overrun the city’s political scene.”

Big data comes to the library — nothing at all concerning about that.MPR’s Curtis Gilbert has the story: “St. Paul Public Library plans to start testing new software to help find some answers. The program connects the data libraries have — like addresses — to other databases. It then creates a demographic profile of patrons. Hadley says new information will give her a better idea of who’s using the library and who isn’t.”

Got to this sentence: “And then things get really interesting: the analysis matches patron records to the Experian Mosaic lifestyle characteristics” and decided to go see what “the Experian Mosaic lifestyle characteristics” was and found this:

It’s full of “marketer-speak”, but I especially liked “Mosaic enables superior campaign results through improved accuracy by applying more than 300 data factors to classify the makeup of Americans and correctly assigning individual households to specific groups.”

Oh great. Libraries are going to start “classifying” their patrons and assigning them to “specific groups”.

Oh, and “Mosaic USA is part of a global segmentation network that classifies more than 2 billion people worldwide.”